“It will end” - Lockdown wisdom from a Bletchley Park codebreaker

                                                                                                  Bletchley Park 

Edith Roberts is 95. She has lived in Gosforth on the northern outskirts of the English city of Newcastle-upon-Tyne for many years. But her quiet life in the affluent suburb hides a compelling tale of wartime military intelligence and secrets, of secluded English manor houses along dark, winding country lanes. 

A pensioner now, Edith played a key role in the Second World War as a Wren at Bletchley Park – the top-secret home of the Allied codebreakers. 

Uncertainty, fear, stoicism and bravery. 

It comes as the UK marks the 75th anniversary of VE Day while in lockdown due to the coronavirus. A story for our times.

“It was a spur of the moment thing. I wanted to do my bit.”

The first of January, 1943. 

It was a long time ago. But the passing years have done nothing to dim the memory of that day.

Coming to a halt outside an office along the elegant sweep of Newcastle’s Grey Street, Edith’s attention was caught by a poster urging her to “Sign up and spare a man for the Fleet!” She went inside.

A few days later and after a medical, she found herself at Mill Hill in London, being warned that the new position was top secret and she would not ever, under any circumstances, be able to tell anyone what she was doing. 

She was given two days think about it. Edith, in a reserved occupation as a dictaphone typist, promptly signed up and became a confidential Wren writer for the Women’s  Royal Naval Service (WRNS).

She was on her way to Bletchley Park.

Bunk beds in an Elizabethan manor

After a long and tedious wartime journey, 18-year-old Edith found herself sharing a dormitory – or “cabin” as they were called, keeping to the naval terminology – full of bunk beds with 13 other Wrens in the historic splendour of Crawley Grange. 

The secluded Elizabethan manor in the depths of the Buckinghamshire countryside had begun its life as a residence for Cardinal Thomas Wolsey in the 16^th century. It was miles from anywhere.

Learning to march was a bit of a shock.

But the team were all very friendly. They were collected by bus every day and taken to Bletchley, an hour’s ride away. 

“We were stuck in the country. There was a lot of hitch-hiking! Everybody hitch-hiked during the war. I got a lift all the way to the Blue House roundabout in Newcastle one time!” Edith says.

There was no entertainment. “There was one pub and one church in the village, but all we wanted to do was sleep when we weren’t working. There was a cinema at Cranfield Aerodrome nearby, but we had no transport. We made our own entertainment!”

“Your job came up!”

                                                                                                                                                                               (Wikipedia)

There were lots of huts at Bletchley. Edith was in 11a - working on the Hollerith decoding machine.  

The days were organised into 8-hour shifts starting at 8 o’clock in the morning, 4pm or midnight. 

She couldn’t go home on her days off - Newcastle was too far away. Wrens were allowed to travel no further than 50 miles from base during wartime. Sometimes she went to the homes of Wrens who lived nearby, her friends. They took her under their wing.

The atmosphere was intense. It was very concentrated work. They were not allowed to speak to each other.

                                                                      (Historyextra.com)

A single Wren operated each machine. “They chose tall people. You needed to be able to reach up to the drums.”

It was hard work - the machines were big, noisy and never stopped. Drums rotated, letters churned out. It was Edith’s job to phone them through to another hut for deciphering. She had no idea what they meant. 

                                                                       Intercept Hut 
                                                                                                                  (Bletchleypark.org)

                                                                   

The machines were there to break codes generated by the Enigma machine. It was used by the German air force, navy and army to send encrypted messages, up to three thousand a day.

Enigma Machine

(Alessandro Nassiri - Museo della Scienza e della Tecnologia "Leonardo da Vinci")

From time to time there was an encouraging glimpse of success. “You would be told ‘your job came up!’ – so you knew your reading was successful at breaking an Enigma code,” Edith remembers. 

It kept them going. They knew what they were doing was important.

Some historians think the codebreakers at Bletchley may have shortened the war by up to two years. And saved countless lives.

“Churchill ordered everything destroyed”

Edith was on an evening watch on VE Day in 1945.

The news came through. The European war was over.

                                                                                                     (BBC)

But there was no immediate celebration at Bletchley. The job wasn't finished.

“We just carried on, we were expecting it. The Japanese war was still on,” Edith recalls.

Churchill ordered that everything at Bletchley be destroyed. The big machines were broken up, records were shredded. Edith was moved to another job and became what was known as a Pay Writer, before eventually being demobbed.

                                                                                              (Laprensa.com)

An invitation to Milton Keynes

It was the 1970s. Thirty years after the end of the war. Edith got a letter she was not expecting.

It invited her to a meeting in Milton Keynes where experts from Bletchley Park would tell those gathered what the codes had meant all those years ago. The information was now declassified.

Edith went and met up with some of her old mates.It was great to see them all again and relive the memories.

“My husband was a Lancaster bomber pilot. We did not talk about the war. He was very upset at what he had had to do. He said he could not forget the sight of leaving German cities ablaze.”

But Edith is very glad she did what she did.

“It will end”

They were tough and scary days, Edith says.

“We did not know if we were going to win or lose the war. There were battles we won and battles we lost.”

The lives of the people working at Bletchley Park were very restricted. They followed orders, they obeyed their superiors. They did their duty.

“But people were very friendly, we were in and out of each other’s houses, we helped each other out. It was completely different. We weren’t confined to the house.”

Edith says times were different then and she would not presume to tell people how to manage the current constraints on their lives due to Covid-19.

But she does say this: “It will end. Everything does eventually.”